Grit

The Chronicle of higher education has a few articles on an interesting psychology measure, "grit", championed by Angela L. Duckworth.

In Traits of the 'Get It Done' Personality: Laser Focus, Resilience, and True Grit, Katherine Mangan cites Robert J. Sternberg, president of the American Psychological Association,
"Being passionate about your work and resilient in the face of setbacks are key, most experts agree. "You're going to go through periods where your articles get rejected, students are giving you bum ratings, and your grant applications are rejected," says Mr. Sternberg, who, after 35 years at Yale and Tufts, became provost and a professor of psychology at Oklahoma State University in 2010. "If you don't believe in yourself, it's easy to think that you're a loser and to stop trying," he says."

She then goes on

"Ms. Duckworth, a former middle-school math teacher, became interested in studying the traits, other than intelligence, that help some students succeed. She zeroed in on the dogged determination and focus shared by successful students, spelling-bee champions, and West Point cadets. Taking a page from a John Wayne movie, she called it "grit." "The gritty person approaches achievement as a marathon," she writes in an article published in an online journal. "The gritty person sticks with it, whereas others might be distracted by boredom, failure, adversity, or plateaus." "

In a more recent article of the Chronicle "'Noncognitive' Measures: The Next Frontier in College Admissions: Admissions offices want to know about traits, like leadership, initiative, and grit, that the SAT doesn't test", grit comes up again:

"Over the last decade, a handful of colleges have designed "noncognitive" assessments to measure attributes—like leadership and the ability to meet goals—that content-based tests do not. Succeeding in college often requires initiative and persistence, or what some researchers call "grit." Noncognitive measures are an attempt to gauge such qualities. If the SAT asks what a student has learned, these assessments try to get at how she learned it."

For more on grit, see also the following from public radio

Here's a link to the grit test.

Stay tuned for a later post on some of the studies, still have to look at them in more detail... Comments from someone who knows something about that very welcome!